Freelancing – A Short Rant

I remember why I got away from freelancing now. I saw the direction it was heading in and figured I should bail before it got too bad. It’s simple really. People want high quality work, but they don’t want to pay for it.

Going through the list of jobs I see a ton of piss-poor requests. “$1 per 500 words” and so on like people are supposed to be able to live off breadcrumbs. The same jobs also beg for “PLAGERISM-FREE, ORIGINAL, SEO …” too.

The main problem, besides most of them being foreign scam artists, is that everyone thinks they can write worth a damn. They’re simply paying a convenience charge not to have to do the job themselves, instead of admitting that it actually takes a smidge of talent to create something out of nothing.

Most people can’t write. It’s not that they don’t have the inherent ability. I think anyone can learn to write well, at a passable professional level even, but it takes time and practice like anything else.

The hardest part of writing isn’t finding your voice, it’s learning how to translate that voice onto paper. There’s a fine line between the grammatical rules you need to follow and those you can break. Figuring out just how to tow that line while putting a bit of yourself onto the page is the true challenge of writing effectively.

Stephen King said writing is modern telepathy. I write what’s in my head and it transmits to yours, the reader’s, through space and even time. It’s a flowery, poetic way to describe what a writer does, but quite accurate.

I’ve always looked at it from the standpoint of a traditional artist. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but fifty words can paint a picture. You wouldn’t offer a boardwalk artist only a dollar for your portrait, so why are you trying to pay me even less?